So, at the age of nine, I became a monk, and from then on I was there practicing that kind of nonviolence.

We are not slaves of the market. Our human life has a greater meaning than making money, making profit, and working for the market or for multinational corporations.

Multinational corporations and a market economy have transformed human beings into instruments of making money. Human beings should be the end. And money should be the means to an end.

This was Mahatma Gandhi’s idea, moving from ownership to relationship—seeing that land does not belong to us. We belong to the land. We are not the owners of the land. We are the friends of the land, like friends of the earth. The fundamental shift is in this consciousness that land does not belong to us, we belong to the land.

We then came to the Soviet Union. One day we were walking and carrying our banner and distributing a few leaflets in Russian to people, and we met two women on the road.

Your children are not your children. They are lives longing for itself. They come here with their own destiny. Give them your love. They will find their own way.

If we had kept the vision of interconnectedness, we would not have created the kind of environmental crisis facing the world today.